Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told KNPR radio that he hopes Republicans aren’t just a bunch of racists for opposing Barack Obama.

“My counterpart, Mitch McConnell, said at the the beginning of the presidency of Barack Obama that he had one goal — and that is to defeat Obama and make sure he wasn’t re-elected. And that’s how they legislate in the Senate. It was really bad. And we’re now seven months into this second term of the president’s and they haven’t changed much.

It’s been obvious that they’re doing everything they can to make him fail. And I hope, I hope, and I say this seriously, I hope that’s based on substance and not the fact that he’s African-American.

So Obama’s policies are failing Americans because Republicans haven’t been accommodating enough? That’s not exactly the kind of legacy building argument a president likes to hear, but really, where else do Democrats have to go? Reid doesn’t hope this is untrue; he needs people to believe it is.

Fact is that few presidents have ever gotten as many broad reforms through congress as this one has — on health care, on banking and on a huge progressive stimulus scheme. It was this president’s administration who implied that we would see 5 percent unemployment if the stimulus was passed, not Republicans. It was this president that made countless promises about Obamacare that have turned out to be fiction, not Mitch McConnell. Maybe you find modern Republicans arguments radical and unworkable, but they’ve always been pretty clear ideologically. Actually, they’ve been rather substantive, as well. Perhaps the hundreds of conservative and libertarian white papers on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act are misguided, but I’m certain none are bigoted.